AI Glossary
Plain English, no jargon
The terms that come up when you are being sold AI, defined the way we would explain them on a call. If a supplier will not define these clearly, that is information.
AI receptionist
A voice system that answers your phone, holds a natural conversation, takes details and books into a live diary. Distinct from an IVR, which just routes you through a menu.
Agent
A system that can take several steps on its own to complete a task, rather than answering one question. In practice this means it can look something up, decide, and act.
Attribution
Knowing which channel, campaign or page produced a given enquiry. Call-level attribution means knowing it down to the individual phone call.
Automation
A workflow that runs without a person triggering each step. Ours are built in n8n, so you can read the logic rather than trusting a black box.
Conversion rate
The share of visitors or enquiries that take the action you wanted. Only useful when you are clear which action you mean.
Core Web Vitals
Google's measures of loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability. They affect both rankings and how many visitors give up before the page appears.
CRM
The system that holds your customers and your pipeline. The test of a good one is whether your team actually uses it, not what it can theoretically do.
Hallucination
When a language model states something confidently that is not true. Controlled by restricting the system to your documented answers and escalating anything outside them.
Intent
What the customer is actually trying to do. A system that recognises intent can route an emergency differently from a price enquiry.
Large language model (LLM)
The technology behind modern AI assistants. It predicts language extremely well, which is why it must be grounded in your real information rather than left to improvise.
n8n
An open source workflow automation tool. We use it because it can be self-hosted and the logic is readable, so you are not locked into per-task pricing.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Giving a model access to your documents so it answers from your information rather than from memory. This is what makes an internal knowledge system trustworthy.
Speed to lead
Time from an enquiry arriving to your first substantive reply. The single most predictive number in most SME sales processes.
Warm transfer
Passing a caller to a human along with the context already gathered, so the customer does not have to start again.
Webhook
A message one system sends another when something happens. The plumbing that lets your booking system tell your CRM that a customer just booked.
Next step
Still not sure what you are being sold?
Bring the proposal. We will tell you what it actually does, even if the answer is that it is fine and you should buy it.